It was our wedding day! she said.
She turned the page. We looked at people dancing: people I knew, all younger.
But had you trusted the signs? I asked.
She shook her head, but not as in no. As in shaking her head free of the thought. She turned more pages, dusky-black paper with delicate photo corners holding the pictures in place, and she pointed out relatives I hadn’t met, or Dad’s dad, who’d died before I was born, holding a napkin to his face like a cowboy. The day grew darker outside, and the whitish sheer dress provided us light on the pages. I looked at the people, and grunted in response as if I’d moved on, but I was still caught back in pages before. My mother looked for signs all the time. A person would be curt to her at the supermarket and she would view it as a sign that she should be nicer to strangers. Joseph would give her an unexpected smile and she’d retrace all her actions to see why she deserved it. Once, we arrived home to a snail at the doorstep and she said it was a sign to slow down, and she took a walk around the block at a funereal pace, saying there was something in there for her if she just took her time. She came back just as vivid-faced as ever. Thank you, little snail, she buzzed, lifting it up and placing it in the cool shadows of a jasmine bush. She was always looking for unexpected guidance, and at that garage sale the world had spit up just exactly what she’d asked for, and what could be a better omen than that? So it must’ve been a real blow, on her wedding day, to find out that the larger hand in action was the hand she was then holding.
We turned the last few pages of the album. Grandma, in a daisy-patterned sack dress. Mom’s sister Cindy, wearing jeans. Some of Dad’s red-cheeked uncles.
You’re in here, Mom said.
No, I said.
You are, Mom said. You and Joe. In the air. The beginning of you, she said. She kissed the top of my head.
On the last page, as if to underline her comment, the kiss: Dad and Mom, pressed close together, layers of that ghostly dress blowing around him. We looked at it for a while.
Do you still have that footstool? I asked.
We crept into the garage, flicking on the light. In the coldness of the room, with its old stone floor and whistling window, Mom and I rummaged through piles, setting aside crates and boxes. After a half-hour or so, wedged behind a rake and a series of brooms, I found it: a moth-eaten sun-bleached peach velvet seat, stretched over a shiny brown wicker crisscross-patterned stool. Look! I said, brushing my hand over the top. Mom, knee-deep in a pile of baby toys, eyed it the way you eye a person you haven’t seen in a long time when the last exchange was complicated. I can build you a better one, she said, dubiously. I patted the seat. This one, I said. The velvet was soft. I sidestepped the piles and took it for my room. Furniture.
14
There are heightened years. One was nine. Another twelve. A third, seventeen. My brother used graph paper to make shapes out of sequences; I saw those years as a trio, but not one I wanted to map out on those small graph-paper squares. I didn’t know how I would label that graph, what the
In the movies, an affair is often indicated by spying at motel rooms, or lipstick marks dashed on a white collar. I was twelve when I sat down to a family dinner of roast beef and potatoes, on a cool February evening, and got such a wallop of guilt and romance in my first mouthful that I knew, instantly, that she’d met someone else. Thick waves of it, in the meat and the homemade sour cream and the green slashes of carefully chopped chives. Oh! I said. I drank down a full glass of water. Ah! my father said, letting out an end-of-day sigh. Roast beef, he murmured, patting his belt. My favorite. I got up to find some factory catsup to help me out, while Joseph turned pages of his book and Mom poured herself a glass of wine. Like it? she said. I glanced over at her. It fit, too: she’d been looking better lately, dressing up more, a little happier, wearing patterned headbands with her ponytail, bracelets on both arms. And things, in general, were in a new flux: Joseph had applied to colleges and was hoping to move out of the house and into the dorm room at Caltech he wanted to share with George. Mom talked often about how much she would miss him, but he didn’t really respond, and whenever a box arrived for any kind of package delivery, regular or Grandma’s, Joseph would empty it and then squirrel it away and begin to put things in it. He was half packed already, months in advance. If he could’ve eaten dinner in his room, he would’ve, but our father insisted we sit together at the table.
I read a study, Dad said, flaring his napkin into his lap. Families that eat dinner together are happier families, he said.
I think those families also talk to each other, I said.
Mom, behind us, spooning up a vegetable, laughed.
It was true: our dinners, always at the table, framed by floral-print kitchen curtains and the rising steam off casserole dishes, were almost always silent in those days unless Mom felt like filling us in on the latest news and gossip in carpentry. Dad didn’t talk much about work: I leave work at work! was his mantra. Of course, right after dinner he’d put his dish in the sink and go into their bedroom to make calls, and he’d work, often, until ten or eleven unless I knocked lightly on his door to deliver the name of an upcoming TV drama like a fisherman’s lure for a reluctant tuna. Even as young as ten, if I whispered the name of the show with enough pull, I could get him to put aside his stack of papers and wander in to watch. If I was quiet enough, he wouldn’t send me to bed. We colluded in this way: as long as I didn’t announce that I was a kid, he wouldn’t rise up as a parent, and for an hour, we could both have a little respite from our roles.
He only liked the medical dramas. The law shows made him crabby.
At dinner, as part of his adolescence, Joseph had taken a liking to reading and eating, so he generally brought a book to the table which he would spread in his lap and peer at between bites. Often a textbook, sometimes a thriller. Both parents had given up trying to stop him, because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn’t have a book, to occupy Joseph’s eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back to our world. By the time he was seventeen, he must’ve memorized the vitamin balances in various raisin-and-oat cereals, and if I’d asked him what percentage of niacin one might find in a single serving of Cheerios, I would not have been surprised if he’d been able to spout the numbers as precisely as his own height and weight.
On this night, he was hunched over, reading the Caltech general information pamphlet about campus for probably the twentieth time. He didn’t read the course catalogue but seemed far more interested in the dorms. Mom refilled her glass of wine. She caught me watching her, and winked.
I didn’t talk at the table because I was busy surviving the meal. After the incident in the ER, I no longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There’s a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent-a show of pain, to try to announce something, and in my crying, in the desperate, blabbering, awful mouth-clawing, I had hoped to get something across. Had it come across, any of it? Nope.
I had been friendly when I was eight; by twelve, fidgety and preoccupied. I kept up my schoolwork and threw a ball when I could. My mouth-always so active, alert-could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I’d use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the foodmaker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California’s was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy
